I. Rice Pereira

Pereira, I. Rice (Irene Rice Pereira)pərāˈrə, 1907–71, American painter, b. Chelsea, Mass. In 1935, Pereira helped found the Federal Art Project design laboratory and taught there for several years. Her mature painting style is characterized by the play of light and space through open, framelike forms juxtaposed against bands or lines in mazelike patterns. These suspended forms and ambiguous spaces are conscious efforts to express in abstract art the idea of fourth-dimensional space. Pereira experimented with glass, parchment, plastics, and other materials. A representative work is Oblique Progression (Whitney Mus., New York City). She was the author of several books including The Nature of Space (1956) and The Transcendental Formal Logic of the Infinite (1966).